If a foreign country was sending more than a million of its people to illegally enter the United States every year surely that would be grounds for war. Mexico is doing that. It is no stretch of imagination to say that Mexico in engaged in an undeclared war on the United States of America.

US Border Patrol Agents, according to a January 10 article in The Washington Times, "apprehended 1.15 million illegal aliens last year trying to sneak into the United States between the nation's land ports of entry, more than 3,100 a day -- a 24 percent increase over the year before." Among them, 23,000 people with criminal records were identified and arrested. They included 84 murder suspects, 37 suspected kidnappers, 151 who were wanted on charges of sexual assault, 313 robbery suspects, and 2,630 others implicated in drug-related charges.

"There were 8,577 drug seizures that confiscated 1.4 million pounds of illegal narcotics with an estimated street value of $1.62 billion," according to the Times article by Jerry Seper. In all, the US Customs and Border Protection agency's inspectors and officers processed 428 million passengers and pedestrians, including 262 million aliens, "denying entry to more than 643,000 aliens under US law." They were in addition to those trying to steal across the border illegally.

All this was happening as the Mexican Foreign Ministry was publishing "The Guide for the Mexican Immigrant." It is a guide on how to enter the US illegally. It is an act of war. It is part of a long-term plan to flood the US, particularly California and the Southwest, with illegal Mexicans in the belief that, once again, the US will grant amnesty to them, thus putting into motion yet another human wave to follow. There must be no amnesty.

President Bush doesn't see it that way. He calls illegal Mexican aliens "undocumented workers." That is just pure sophistry. It's spin. He calls the flood of illegal Mexicans "a problem", but it is much more than that. It is an undeclared act of war.

We have fought wars with Mexico in the past. Indeed, Mexico had invited Americans to settle Texas after it had won independence from Spain. In 1836, after the Alamo was overrun, the Battle of San Jacinto resulted in Texas becoming an independent republic. By 1845, the US had annexed Texas. This was followed by the Mexican-American war in 1846-7. By September 14, 1847, our Marines were in Mexico City and we are still singing about the "Halls of Montezuma." The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war with the annexation of the Oregon Territory and much of the Southwest, i.e., California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. The US paid Mexico $15 million for the land acquired. The US paid additional millions for the Gadsden Purchase of land that now comprises a part of Arizona.

Today, the oligarchy ruling Mexico has hit upon a plan to not only regain its former territory by a de facto form of demographics, deliberately re-populating those States with Mexican citizens and seeking a series of amnesties to confer citizenship that by-passes the normal process, but it is also seeking to suck still more money out of the US with an audacious plan to raid Social Security. It's not enough that the second largest amount of money Mexico "earns" comes from funds sent home by illegal aliens estimated to number between eight and ten million.

Writing in a recent issue of The American Enterprise, Marti Dinerstein, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that Social Security arrangements between nations are intended to prevent dual taxation of employees who work temporarily in another country and the employers who send them. The second objective is to guarantee an old-age pension for workers who end up paying into the Social Security systems of two countries, but earn insufficient credits to qualify for retirement from either of them alone.

Twenty nations, Mexico included, have Social Security reciprocity agreements with the US. Eight of them have so few of these legal, temporary workers that the US Census Bureau doesn't even keep track. "By 2000, there were an estimated 9.2 million Mexicans living and working in the US."

I have concluded that no branch of the US government has any realistic idea of how many illegal Mexicans are in the country. One thing's for sure, though, the Social Security pact currently making its way through Congress, as Dinerstein notes, provides no parity between the US and Mexico which accounts for an estimated 69 percent of all illegal aliens in the nation! The pact would be a windfall calculated in millions of dollars for Mexico.

Advocates of "open borders" want the US to sign this Social Security agreement with Mexico and the Bush administration is claiming only 50,000 Mexicans would qualify for it. That figure is bogus. Rep. Rohrabacher says simply enough, "We are talking about huge sums of money -- not just for retirement, but for disability payments, premature deaths, caring for the families of illegal immigrants", adding that "it is an outrageous violation of our obligation to watch out for senior citizens of the United States."

Wisely, he calls for "a law specifically banning work by illegal aliens from qualifying for Social Security." Indeed, he has a bill -- HR 1631 -- to prohibit the work histories of non-citizens who are here illegally from being counted toward Social Security earnings." If HR 1631 doesn't become law, millions of illegal aliens, if yet another amnesty is granted, will become part of the Social Security system because all the time they worked here illegally will be credited to their accounts.

Mexico, in collusion with the Bush administration, is maneuvering to suck Social Security funds across the border for millions of their citizens who are currently here illegally. This is the same administration that is telling us that we must "fix" the Social Security system to protect future generations of Americans.

I can't tell you exactly when the second Mexican-American War began, but I can tell you it is going on right now.